Using RESTful URLs on your Spring 3 MVC Webapp

This blog comes as an answer to a question from a reader. Now, as a rule, I don’t do request blogs, but I thought that this sounded like an interesting topic. The question refers to my blog from July 11 on accessing request parameters using Spring 3 MVC and was “Do you know how to encode the uuid so it is not visible to the user for security concerns?”. The answer is “Yes”, but that would make for a very short blog.

RC4 Encryption

Bazinga! I hope that everyone who read yesterday’s ROT13 blog spotted the Sheldon Cooper-esque 'clever prank' for the more secure double ROT13 aka ROT26 algorithm. Today’s blog takes encryption one step further and covers the hugely popular RC4 encryption algorithm developed by Ron Rivest, indeed the RC stands for Ron’s Code. Although now broken, the RC4 algorithm is still widely used in protocols such as SSL and WEP.

ROT13 Encryption

I thought that today I’d tackle the thorny issue of encryption starting with one of the most simple and weakest algorithms available: ROT13. ROT13 is a simple character shift or Caesar (or Caesar’s) cipher. In ROT13 each plain text character is replaced with one that’s 13 characters further along the alphabet. For example: ABC becomes NOP, whilst the plain text characters after M loop around back to the start of the alphabet; hence: MNO becomes ZAB whilst XYZ becomes KLM. Note that only upper and lower case letters in the English alphabet are encoded.